


He asks, anxious to hear the story

by Fallynleaf



Category: Original Work, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore | If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Genre: Dark, Essentially Original Fiction, Gen, Trains, missing chapter, pacific northwest gothic, tunnels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24874096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallynleaf/pseuds/Fallynleaf
Summary: It was a dark and stormy night.
Kudos: 4





	He asks, anxious to hear the story

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece years ago as part of an assignment for class wherein I was asked to write a missing "first chapter" from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. This was what I produced. It was my first attempt at [my own idea](https://fallynleaf.tumblr.com/post/114385811158/but-wheres-all-of-the-pacific-northwest-gothic) of what a "pacific northwest gothic" story might look like.
> 
> I was really proud of this piece, and I wanted to do something with it as original fiction, but I ultimately realized that even though the story is completely original, it's still tied too closely to the themes and rhythm of this book, so it can't fully stand on its own.
> 
> It sort of straddles the lines between original fiction and fanfiction. For a long time, I couldn't see what to do with it, so I just shelved it deep in my hard drive and forgot about it. Then I realized that I could publish it here!
> 
> There is only one empty space between the chapters of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and it falls between chapter eleven and chapter twelve. This "missing chapter" goes there.
> 
> If you haven't read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, this piece should still be fully readable!

It was a dark and stormy night—stop there. Fellow readers, we all know how this one ends. There is no need for me to reveal the title; every single one of us has read this book. I close the slim paperback and set it down on the seat beside me. The train bellows, an exhale of a forlorn whistle, and I reach into my bag for another book.

There is a gentle lullaby in travel, in the tender shaking of the train beneath you, the walls and floor and ceiling encasing you in a crib of muted sounds, your eyelids drooping heavier and heavier as you move through the foggy green, words on the page blurring, rumbling into silence when

It was a dark and stormy night—this one's not any good, either! I close it sharply and toss it onto the other pulp novel beside me.

I've never been able to fall asleep on trains. Nor am I able to sleep in cars, or in airplanes. My only recourse, then, is to turn to books to pass the countless in-between hours of travel that fall between the point of departure and the destination. A traveler such as I is necessarily a desperate one, and I cannot always afford to be highly selective with the quality of my reading material.

I had purchased several books prior to boarding the train, anticipating that one or two might prove disappointments. My bag bulges with them, right-angled corners stretching the thick fabric and poking into the seat in front of me. I reach into my bag again and retrieve a fatter paperback this time. I open the cover, feeling the freshly pressed spine creak in my hands, and

It was a dark and stormy night—

The pile on the seat next to me has become just that—a haphazard stack of beginnings with endings that I do not care to read. Because I will find nothing new there, nothing to distract me from the glistening sweat beading at my forehead, from the slight tremor in my fingers as I turn the inky pages in my hand, listening to the distant rumble of thunder in the unbroken grey sky.

For there _is_ a storm, dear reader, and the gathering dusk is approaching an ashy charcoal. Here, you begin to realize that I am a nervous traveler. That sound the author is describing—it is the sound of my heart skipping in my throat, the twitching of my eyes as I read and reread the first sentence again and again, unable to enter the world of the book because my fear has absorbed my entire focus. 

The rain starts. A sheet of wet, pounding against the window. I startle violently, and the pages slip through my fingers, losing my place. It doesn't matter; the book wasn't any good, anyways.

I hear a murmur of voices, my fellow passengers remarking on the storm, possibly. I open my bag wider, and reach into it again. The next book is buried deeper. I find it beneath my coiled up scarf, tucked away in a corner. This book, which may be the last book, has a crisp smell to its ivory pages. This is promising, except

It was a dark and stormy night—I stop, then decide to press onward. But a voice drifts over the seat in front of me, and I cannot help but pick up on the words.

"I heard there's a criminal on board this train. Picked him up at the stop just before we entered the mountains," a woman's voice says. I recall what she looks like: she's tall, with a delicate, long neck and a red hat.

"Who let him aboard?" a man asks. Her husband. Stout, green flannel shirt. Pine needles in his hair.

"That's just it: he used his twin brother's name and I.D. to buy his tickets. No one thought anything of it until after it was too late to let him off."

They were talking about _my_ stop. I think back to the line of people waiting around me, standing beneath a tumultuous grey sky, waiting for the train's headlights to pierce through the soupy afternoon as it rounded the corner. I try to remember the faces of all of the people who had boarded with me, but they are nebulous and indistinct.

The train gives a great shudder as the wind howls and batters at the side, and my stack of books topples over. There is a storm, I remember, feeling a phantom chill. A storm and a criminal.

I glance around, but my flittering gaze cannot recognize any of the faces of the people seated around me.

This enclosed crib of walls and floor and ceiling—it is a prison cell.

A rattle ahead signifies the door opening between the train compartments. A man walks down the aisle past me. His hair is dark and unruly, his eyes hard steel. I catch his gaze without meaning to. A mistake—I should not be drawing attention to myself.

The safety pamphlet in the pocket on the back of the seat says: "If you see something suspicious or unusual, say something!" The exclamation mark proclaims a sense of urgency, of downward movement punctuated by a warning. My fellow travelers, then, are my overseers. Sets of watchful, prying eyes.

Outside, the last of the daylight is fading fast. I check my watch, counting the minutes until my estimated arrival.

Then everything plunges into darkness.

 _The tunnel_ , I remember, calming my rapid heartbeat. The train has entered a tunnel. Beside me, the window is a black box cut into the artificial night, but the little overhead light casts a dusty beam onto my lap, illuminating the face of my watch.

All of the lights on the train flicker, once, twice. And for a few long seconds, I am swallowed up in a complete and all-encompassing darkness.

But the lights come back on, and everyone in my vicinity releases a gentle exhale of relief, and I can breathe again. Or did I just imagine it? Did I mistake a blink of my own eyes for a brief power failure? The memory already feels unreal, false, and I wonder if my fear is distorting my perception.

"Hello," a voice says. A woman's. I turn, and there she is: a lovely heart-shaped face framed in brown curls, smiling softly. "Do you mind if I sit here?" she asks.

"No," I say without thinking. I look at the seat, and all of my books are still there, spilling into the crack between the cushions. I hastily gather them up and shove them back into my bag.

She eases into the seat quietly.

It is still dark outside, I realize. Darker than night. We must still be inside the tunnel.

"This is a very long tunnel, isn't it?" I say to the woman.

"Yes, it always is," she says, her voice a little sad. "What were you reading?" she asks.

"The same book, four times," I say. At her look of confusion, I reach down and fetch one of the books."All of them start with—how about I just show you?" I open the book—I don't remember which one—again to that first page, that same first page, and I hold it out to her. Her slim fingers reach up to take the book from me, long and pale and delicate looking, and I cannot look away from them, those beautiful hands, until her fingers are about to brush against my skin—

And then they don't. Her hand passes right through mine as if it weren't even there.

I yank my arm away.

The woman does not acknowledge my reaction. She smiles, and she moves her hand as if she had received a book. She starts to turn the invisible object over in her hands, and I find myself reaching towards her again, until my hand is resting on her hand, but there is nothing beneath my palm, no flesh, no warmth, just this incorporeal echo of a woman who is not there.

I stand up. My legs are shaking. Am I on the same train as the one I had boarded? I can no longer remember, just as I can no longer remember the faces of those who had boarded with me, cannot match those faces to the people seated around me. It is as if my reality has been superimposed over a displaced time.

I start to wonder, then, if this tunnel is the same tunnel as the one I had entered, or if it is an entirely different tunnel. The _other_ tunnel, perhaps, the one sealed away in the mountain after an avalanche killed a hundred people.

And who is to say that the other people around me are not all ghosts riding out this doomed train to its bloody end?

The more I look at the woman, the more familiar she starts to appear. I can see a smear of blood at the corner of her forehead, a curl of brown hair slicked down over it. She has the kind of eyes that grow wide and sad with fear. I can imagine the shape of her lips as her mouth forms the words _please, oh god, please don't_.

A gentle sound distracts me, the clatter of wheels against the unseen tracks as the train forges onwards. Is this justice, then? A criminal's evaded punishment finally coming due?

In the distance, I hear a rumble.


End file.
